Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  THE SOUTH BEACH OFFICE WAS QUIET WHEN THEY REACHED IT, Alex’s head bent over the laptop she’d dragged over to the couch, and she was frowning furiously. Quiet wasn’t good. A happy Alex was a chatty Alex. It meant that even with the heads-up phone call, Alex hadn’t had any luck locating Tierney Wales.

  “I can’t believe this guy!” Alex erupted into speech, without ever looking up. “He just vanished from the system in the past two years. No bank, no credit cards, no address, no DMV. Nothing. I mean, I got a few random Google hits, old mentions of a Web site that’s gone down. Other than that, he’s a ghost.” She licked her lips, and said, “Um, Syl? Promise you won’t be mad?”

  “What’d you do?” Sylvie asked. “Are the cops going to break down the door, and did it work?”

  “No cops. I hacked the ISI database with Demalion’s old codes.”

  “Jesus,” Sylvie said. “That’s the last thing we need, them having a reason to dig back into my life.”

  “I thought they were the good guys,” Wright said.

  “The ISI and I don’t agree on which of us is the good guy. They staked out my office for years, gave up recently. I don’t want them back,” Sylvie said. She grinned mirthlessly. “Waste of taxpayers’ money.” Her temper itched at her. Sitting still made her crazy. Dead ends made her angry.

  Sylvie leaned against the desk, and Alex looked up, belatedly puzzled. “The bell’s not going off.”

  “Locked the briefcase in the truck box,” Sylvie said. “I’m sick of it. Sick of the whole damn thing, and those Hands aren’t healthy to keep close. Next you know, we’ll all be having bad dreams. Find Wales and let me shove those things down his throat.”

  “I’m trying,” Alex said.

  “Try harder. We don’t have the time to stake out the Grove in the vain hope of catching him selling bones to tourists.”

  “What about the girl?” Wright asked. “Bella. Why don’t you ask her?”

  Sylvie blinked a moment, then said, “I should have thought of that.” She should have. Normally, she would have—only thinking about Bella made her think about Zoe, and that made her dizzy with horrible possibilities.

  Sylvie really missed the early days, when it was find the monster, kill the monster, and the biggest problem was getting rid of the body.

  It will come to that, her little dark voice assured her, nearly purring. It always does.

  “I’ll give Bella a call.”

  She left Wright and Alex eyeing each other warily and went upstairs for the phone and some privacy. At her office door, she closed her eyes and leaned against the peeling green doorjamb. She had to be better than this, think faster than this, distance herself from all of this. It was no different from any other case. If she couldn’t stop thinking that it was Demalion’s soul on the line, or her sister’s life, she wouldn’t be doing her best work.

  Sylvie picked up the phone, hesitated, then pulled Zoe’s cell out of the drawer. Given the miracle of caller ID, Bella’d be more likely to pick up if she thought it was Zoe.

  The phone rang through to voice mail, three times running.

  Unease rose. For a teenage girl, answering the cell phone was an avocation and not a chore.

  She dialed the house number, and, when Eleanor answered, said, “I need to talk to Bella. It’s important.”

  Eleanor’s response slipped in and out of English. Sylvie followed just enough of it to get cold to the bone. Alex greeted her return with, “Bella give you an answer?”

  “Bella’s in the hospital. She’s not expected to make it.” Sylvie collapsed on the couch. “Total systemic failure. Like rapid-onset AIDS. Her entire body’s shutting down.” She stared at the ceiling, watching the sunlight shift along the plaster. “She wanted to bond with the Hand. She kept it beneath her pillow, slept with it, carted it about with her. Decorated it. She invited it into her soul.”

  Wright shivered, a spasm of movement there and gone, unnoticeable except this was Miami, and even the air-conditioned office ran closer to sultry than shiver.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You stay the hell away from those things. Don’t touch them; don’t look at them.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “You’re the one carries them sightseeing.”

  Alex said, “What are you going to do? Can you save Bella?”

  “I don’t know how the Hands work. I don’t know what kind of connection they have to Bella, to Zoe. Bella was trying to bond with it, and now she’s sick. . . . Finding a way to sever that connection has to be the first priority. Hopefully, destroying them will do it. Wales is our best bet.”

  “He’s the seller!” Wright said.

  “Then he’ll have the manual,” Sylvie said.

  “We still have to find him,” Alex pointed out. “Just saying.”

  “If he’s selling things on the street, the beat cops will know him,” Wright said. He rocked back on his heels, slid his hands into his jeans pockets, read their faces, and said, “What? It’s a good idea.”

  “We don’t call the cops,” Alex said.

  “Not our MO,” Sylvie said. “Alex, call the Grove merchants’ association. They’ll know who he is.”

  16

  Necromancy for Beginners

  THE SKY BLED PINK AND GOLD AND RED, USHERED IN A SINKING LINE of darkest indigo, and, though it was lovely, all Sylvie saw in it was another example of bad timing. She was off her game. First, she’d dragged Wright out to visit Tatya and Marisol on a full-moon night; now they were headed into one of Florida’s most crime-ridden cities hunting for a necromancer. The Grove merchants had paid off; one underpaid clerk had coughed up an address. It might be a blind, but Sylvie doubted anyone would list an address in Opa-locka for the prestige.

  The gun nestled against her spine was fragile reassurance.

  Wright sat silently in the passenger’s seat, head tilted back against the headrest, eyes closed, and reflected sun scald washing over his skin, warming the exhausted pallor from his cheeks.

  “You should have stayed with Alex,” she said.

  “No,” he said, without even opening his eyes though they moved behind his closed lids. His lashes tipped gold in the sunset, sparse in places, evidence of stressful rubbing. Sylvie jerked her gaze back to the slowly darkening highway before her. Demalion’s lashes had been plush, ridiculously long, and as black as a bad-luck cat. She’d kissed them once, felt them flutter against her lips, a fragile shield for Demalion’s clairvoyant gaze.

  “You’re tense,” he said. He rolled his head to look at her; she took another quick glance in his direction and felt her spine screw up even tighter.

  “I’m driving into Opa-locka after dark with severed hands in my truck and a ghost-possessed refugee cop at my side. My sister’s AWOL, maybe of her own volition, maybe not. There’s something you should know about the Magicus Mundi: Time is never on your side.”

  “You couldn’t have told me that when I was holding the rock?” Wright said.

  Rock? Sylvie frowned, then got it. The tombstone pendant.

  “I don’t want to end up with a permanent roommate,” Wright added. “Just saying. I don’t care how good a guy he is. I play nice. I share a lot of things with a lot of people. I’ll even give you the shirt off my back. But not my skin.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and said, “Not an accusation, Shadows. Just sayin’.”

  They made the rest of the trip in aching silence. Sylvie opened her mouth every mile, a question burning on her tongue that she couldn’t voice. She didn’t know if Wright had picked up the stone or left it in the gutter, or if Demalion had: If they were keeping secrets from her or each other.

  When she saw the first of the Moorish-style buildings that studded Opa-locka’s streets, Sylvie slowed and started looking for the address Alex had given her.

  Wales’s apartment building, like so many of the others, looked like it had weathered one too many heavy storms; the facade was crumbling, windows were boarded over and graffitied, while others wer
e cracked. A streetlamp blinked feebly and went out as they passed. Too much damage, too few jobs, too much bad history—Opa-locka was a city that had long ago fallen apart at the seams.

  Sylvie pulled over to what passed for a curb, scraggy grass clumps and a broken sidewalk, a chain-link panel propped up all on its lonesome, and cut the engine.

  Keeping an eye on the street, she tugged the briefcase from her truck box, glad the duct tape masked its original value. The last thing she needed was to be mugged and have to hunt down the Hands all over again.

  “Second floor?” Wright asked. He had opened his eyes the moment the truck slowed and was squinting out into the night, all purpose, the beat cop on patrol. She had to admit she was glad to have him along.

  “Second floor,” she agreed. She locked the truck, hoped that its battered state would keep it safe from further vandalism, from outright theft, and headed inside. An arched entryway revealed creamy limestone beneath peeling rose paint. The lobby was dim and cluttered and smelled of mildew and ammonia; a dark stairwell led upward, lightbulbs broken off in the fixtures. Random junk littered the steps—empty cans, tangled rags, old shoes, and beer bottles.

  “Watch your step,” she said. “Try not to knock anything down. Some neighborhoods use—”

  “Use clutter as an early-warning system. Kick a can, get shot. A cheap alarm. Chicago, remember?” Wright’s hand twitched, and Sylvie thought she should have found a gun for him, too. Wright and Demalion both had the skills.

  The door they wanted was the last one on a long, dark hall, the carpet threadbare and studded with broken glass. The numbers on the old doors were drawn on with Sharpies, narrow, wavering numerals barely visible in the gloom. A door beside them creaked open as the floor sagged beneath their weight and revealed an apartment littered with paper and scattering rats. The smell was pungent, making her eyes water. Wright pulled the door closed again.

  Sylvie couldn’t imagine her fastidious sister or her spoiled friends making this trek through squalor. But if Wales was the merchant she was looking for, she doubted he was careless enough to conduct transactions on the crowded streets of Coconut Grove. Here, at least, there’d be privacy and a lack of witnesses.

  Sylvie stopped at the last door and drew her gun. Wright hissed, a tiny protest. She shook her head: Trust me. It was best to go in hard, go in fast, and never let them get a chance to fire off a spell.

  Control first, question later; the only safe method of dealing with magic users. Besides shooting them straight off, but that was only if you didn’t want to question them later.

  Sylvie licked her lips, a tiny doubt slowing her. Generally, powerful people didn’t live in tenements. Generally. Maybe she had the wrong place, the wrong guy.

  “Hang back,” she murmured.

  A wave of dizziness struck. Ammonia fumes, sucked in by her quickened breathing, she thought, and tried to shake it off. Too late, the alternative occurred to her. A spell cast from behind a slowly opening door. A Hand of Glory being lit. She flung out a hand, trying to shove Wright back, hopefully into a safe distance, but he fell, eyes gone black and blank—lights out—and she thought, No, no, no! even as the dizziness swung back around, huge, dark, and swallowed her whole.

  Her last aggravated thought was at least she had the right guy.

  THERE WERE FINGERS ON HER FACE, PUSHING BACK HER HAIR, DOING something ticklish to her forehead. She jerked away, but couldn’t get far; her head banged into something unyielding, and her arms moved a bare inch at best. She jerked again, panic and rage filling her skin as she understood the situation: She was bound, a loose coil of rope about her waist, wrapped about her wrists. Bound to a chair; from the feel of it, a cheap one, all bare wood and splinter. She blinked and blinked, trying to clear the darkness away, but it lingered. The only light came through a dusty window, showed her very little but a scarecrow of a man leaning over her.

  “It’s all right,” an unfamiliar voice said. Not Wright, not Demalion either. The Ghoul? Seemed disturbingly plausible.

  “Get the hell away from me!” she growled.

  He backed off, and some of the darkness went with him.

  Her forehead itched and tingled; her skin tightened. “What did you do to me?”

  “Woke you right on up,” he said. “Otherwise, it might have been morning before you recovered. Don’t you worry. You prove yourself sensible, and I’ll untie you.”

  She watched his figure move away, bend over another bulky shadow—Wright, slumped and bound, in another chair—and reach out a long spindly arm.

  “Don’t touch him,” she said.

  “Just waking him up. ’Less you want privacy for our chat.” His fingers gleamed wetly. Under the weight of her gaze, he said, “It’s nothing harmful. Just milk to drive back the flame and salt to draw the boundaries. Did you ever wonder about the stories?”

  Texas, Alex had said. Tierney Wales had come from Texas, and yeah, there was a distinctive twang to their captor’s voice, the slow, drawn-out syllables as if they had nothing more strenuous before them than a pleasant chat. Made him sound more confident than she thought he was.

  The knots holding her to the chair weren’t all that tight—sloppy work. It couldn’t have been the result of haste. She and Wright had been dead to the world. “Stories?” she asked, even as part of her brain was reminding her that engaging with madmen was a losing proposition.

  “Dairymaids and kitchen girls. It’s always one or the other. Knowledge gets itself coded and passed down in scary stories. The ones left awake when the burglars come calling with the Hands of Glory are the milkmaids and the kitchen tweenies. The girls with milk on their skins. Babies, too, sometimes. If they fed recently. Guess maybe the nursing mothers. It’s nature and birth against unnature and death. . . . Your friend’s sure taking his own sweet time, isn’t he?”

  “If he’s hurt, I’ll take your damn Hand of Glory and make you choke on it.”

  “You couldn’t get close enough,” he said. “Trust me on that. You’re hardly the first who’s come gunning for me, Shadows.”

  “You know me?”

  “I make it a habit to know the local players. I knew you’d come a-knock, knock, knocking on my door sooner or later, ready to run me out of town.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Oh, I’m trouble, all right. I get that. But I don’t have to be your trouble, if you’re sensible ’bout things,” he said. He laughed shortly, bent back over Wright, patted his cheek.

  Her vision was adapting; there was a tight line of tension in his spine that she didn’t think was purely for having two people tied up in his apartment. His next slap was a little louder. “C’mon, fella. Sleepyheads miss all the pancakes.”

  As worried as she was, she still found pleasure in adding to his evident stress. “You know, he died recently. His soul is fragile. And he’s had the Hands used on him twice already.”

  “Shit,” Wales said. “Shit, that’s not good.” His voice tightened, the drawl disappearing.

  “What do you care?” she asked.

  “I don’t hurt people.”

  “You and Colt. Utterly blameless. Not your fault if people misuse your products.”

  Wright snorted suddenly, a sharply indrawn breath, then jerked in place. His chair screeked as it shifted beneath him.

  Sylvie jerked her head in his direction, trying to peer into the darkness. “Wright?”

  “Shadows,” he said, his voice thick and slow, fighting his way to coherency. But in the one word, she heard enough to know this was Demalion waking.

  Demalion. Not Wright. A good thing in this case. Demalion, after all, had experience with the Magicus Mundi and the people in it. Would be less prone to panic. And panic was still on the table. Sylvie’s eyes were adjusting, and there were . . . things dangling in the air. . . .

  “Give us some light?” Demalion bitched. “We’re not mushrooms.” Cranky. Guess Wright’s purely human vision wasn’t enough for Demalion’s taste.

>   Wales hesitated; he walked the steps between them twice over, thin fingers testing her bonds, though he didn’t seem to be bothered that she had gotten her hand nearly through one of the loops.

  “Yeah, all right. But be calm.”

  His movement stirred the still air in the apartment, and Sylvie smelled old rot and spice, turned milk, and the thick, organic, just-this-side-of-unpleasant scent of tallow, and she swallowed hard. “Turn on the lights. Turn them on now.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “I mean, it is, but not for the reasons—”

  “Now!” she snapped. She yanked her hand free, leaving a thin layer of skin behind in the rope’s coil.

  A single light bloomed, lower than she had expected—a table lamp on the floor, its yellowed shade turning the light it cast into something like firelight. Shadows loomed above them. As did other things.

  “A little more light. I like to see who I’m dealing with,” she said, to keep her mouth from filling with nauseated saliva. Her eyes continued to pick out details in their surroundings. Strange shapes dangled spiderlike from the ceiling.

  Her free hand slipped down into the shadows of the chair, but her holster was empty, her gun gone.

  Wales walked past her; a second lamp sputtered into life, fitful and fluorescent. When it stabilized, she saw that her first impression had been right. Withered, human hands hung on thongs looped over hooks in the ceiling. They dangled, fingers down, just below head height as if they were prepared to grab intruders by the throat.

  The ropes she tugged against slacked all at once, and she lunged out of her chair. Wales sidestepped her, nimbly dancing up into and over the chair she had just vacated, putting it between them. “Don’t you get hasty. It’s not what you think.” “No?” she said. Her breath was fast but steady. In the light, he wasn’t much to look at—thin-boned and skinny with it, bags under his eyes, a rat’s nest of hair and shapeless clothing. She might even have an inch or two on him.

  All her muscles tensed, ready to pounce, but Wales yanked a grisly Hand from his pocket, held it up. “Don’t you make me use it again. It’s not good for any of us.”